1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a reading learning tool which uses finger puppets and more specifically to a reading learning tool including a plurality of finger puppets, each puppet having one or more letters thereon which can be placed on a student's hands to help a student learn to read.
2. Related Art
Teaching a young student or child to read is a long process. Initially, a child learns the letters of the alphabet and then, beginning with two and three letter words, the student is taught to string together the sounds of the letters to create words. Thereafter, this process can be used to sound out and spell longer words, eventually leading to reading and writing.
It is known that in order to help young students become familiar with the letters of the alphabet, including the way the letters look and how they sound, it is beneficial to allow such students to interact as much as possible with the letters and words. As such, there are numerous reading learning programs that include physical three dimensional representations of letters so that students can actually handle the letters. Likewise, it is known to represent the sounds of letters by correlating the names of objects beginning with the letter to the letter. For example, the sound of the letter “a” is typically first taught with reference to the word “apple,” and the symbol of an apple is often times used to represent the letter “a.” Numerous objects have been linked to letters to help students recollect the sound of the letters.
Another reading learning tool that has been employed by one of the inventors to help a young student to sound out a word is to count the letters in the word and hold up a corresponding amount of fingers. Then, the young student knows that it must make a sound corresponding to each of the fingers, i.e. each of the letters, to pronounce, and accordingly read, the word. As such, with the word “sat,” a student would hold up three fingers, and make a sound corresponding to each finger, namely “s,” “a,” and “t” and in making those three sounds, slowly at first and then faster, the young student effectively sounds out and reads the word “sat.”
What would be desirable, but has not been heretofore been provided, is a reading learning tool that allows a student to easily interact with letters which can be used by the student on his or her fingers to assist the student in reading and pronouncing words.